The Laziest Man in the World, on Wheels

I’m the Laziest Man in the World.

They say that resting is the other part of training.

I’ve spent a good chunk of this season learning how to rest. Yep, if it's true what they say, I've been training *hard as hell*.

Now before you shrug this off as my usual blather, I’d like you to ask yourself some questions.

- If you are riding on a bike trail and a 350-400 pound man on a Magna ‘full suspension’ ‘mountain bike’ passes you, with the bike’s frame tubes groaning in what might be the bike’s first ever, and last ride, do you feel compelled to pick up speed, pass the guy, and drop him going up the next hill?

- Do you feel guilty if you are going so slow, that pedestrians can draft off you?

- Do you feel that you have to maintain a certain speed, say, 18 MPH, and anything below this just isn’t riding?

- How about days off. Is it simply impossible for you to take more than a single day off the bike?

- What about hills? When you get to a hill, do you have to go up it at a good pace? Do you cringe and get stomach cramps at the mere thought of up a hill at 4.2 MPH, with elderly grandmothers pushing baby carriages with twins past you on the upslope?

- Here’s the big one. If you are riding recovery, and some of your buddies happen by, doing a fairly easy (but still tempo) ride, do you latch on the back, reasoning, hey, what the hell, a bit of wheelsucking can’t hurt?

If you answered any of those questions with "yes," then you are a pathetic, non-resting, highly motivated Type A Personality / bad training fool.

I know whereof I speak; I was one of them until this year. A couple people on the Squadra gave me crap about not resting hard enough last year. I *knew* they were correct, but I couldn’t bring myself to slow down enough and really, really rest.

With the help of a Powertap, and my own surpassing (increasingly surpassing, really) supreme laziness, I have at last learned how to rest.

You want to know what a recovery ride should look like? Here’s the masterpiece I turned in today.

Distance: 30.1 miles.

Average Speed: 15.6 MPH

Average Power: 165 watts (this is about the lightest spin I can manage without my feet flying off the pedals)

Norm Power: 187 watts (okay, I screwed up here. This figure is basically “how hard the ride felt to your legs due to variations in pace”) is about 10 watts over “active rest”. So I could have gone a little easier.

Average Heartrate: 114. (This is below what Joe Friel classes as a workout. We’re talking major rest.)

Training Stress Score: 68 (For comparison, an hour at threshold would be 100; two hours would be 200, etc).

Intensity Factor: .058 (not even hard enough to really get significant aerobic benefits.

Bet you a couple Benjamins you can't ride easier than that.

So yeah, that’s a great recovery ride. My legs feel fresher now than they did this morning, and I will actually show recovery on the Cycling Peaks “freshness curve,” the Training Stress Balance curve. It will show that my legs actually got fresher in spite of riding two hours, and indeed they feel better. I’m ready to go a little bit harder tomorrow than I did today, all without having to take a non-riding rest day.

Why? Because I am a lazy, lazy dog. You ought to try to learn how to do this if you don't know how.

It feels good, I must admit.

Now leave me alone. I have to get back to taking a nap on the porch. And to nipping some of these damn fleas. Anybody got some Purina Lazy Dog Chow I could munch on?